UNLV exhibit features nonconformist works by Russian artists

Thursday, Jan. 4, 2001 | 10:26 a.m.

What: "Cold War, Hot Culture: America and Russian Nonconformist Art" exhibition.

When: On display through Feb. 16; museum hours are 8 a.m.-4:45 p.m. Monday- Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday.

Where: UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum.

Tickets: Free.

Information: 895-3381 or 895-0259 (guided tours).

A veil of secrecy shrouded the Soviet Union until the collapse of Communism there 15 years ago.

People curious about what it was like to be an artist behind the Iron Curtain, before former President Mikhail Gorbachev began the dissolution of the world's oldest Communist government, can get a peek by visiting UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum.

The "Cold War, Hot Culture: America and Russian Nonconformist Art" exhibition is on display at the museum through Feb. 16. It features paintings, photographs and other media by about 20 controversial Russian artists who have emigrated to the United States in recent years.

"Essentially, it is a retrospective of Cold War-era art of dissident Soviet artists and their contribution to bringing down the Soviet Union," Dmitri Shalin, professor of sociology at UNLV, said. "This exhibit starts with how official (Soviet) propaganda pictured America -- it is art as propaganda and propaganda as art."

Shalin, who is not an artist himself, conducts tours of the exhibit during which he discusses the events in the Soviet Union. He is director of a project he developed to study Russian culture in transition.

"When the Bolsheviks (Communists) came to power (in 1917) there was a big rivalry and America quickly emerged as the ultimate 'other,' as the enemy, as everything that was wrong with the West," he said. "Whatever fears and paranoias Russians had about themselves, such as their own problems with the KGB (secret police), they would project them on the CIA and such."

Typically, Russian artwork degraded America with such tactics as distorting the Statue of Liberty or including Hitler in the background of an American scene. Artists focused on such issues as racism, crime and corporate greed.

"It was very crude, none too subtle," Shalin said.

Shalin said officially America was always "an embodiment of ills plaguing capitalist society. For many Russian artists, on the other hand, the U.S. had been the source of profound fascination and ambivalence."

A thaw in relations between the two countries began when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev came to the United States in 1959 and called for disarmament and peaceful coexistence. That same year the first exhibition sponsored by the United States in the Soviet Union was held in Moscow.

Seeing America

The exhibition gave Soviet citizens their first real look at American culture.

"It brought in consumer goods, cars and art -- expressionist art, which very much impressed young Russian artists," Shalin said. "From that point on we had a burgeoning nonconformist art scene in Russia."

Two of the artists credited with leading the artistic revolution are Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, who have been artistic partners since meeting in Moscow in the 1960s. Their movement was called Sots Art, equivalent to Pop Art in the U.S.

"Russian artists noticed with some amazement that American advertisement is very much like Soviet propaganda," Shalin said. "It's relentless, it's relentlessly cheerful, it's full of cliched language."

Lenin's profile began appearing on red banners emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo; the Marlboro cigarette logo became an artistic statement; Stalin's profile appeared in art beside the profile of Marilyn Monroe.

"Artists began to juxtapose American imagery and Soviety imagery ... icons of the West and icons of the East," Shalin said.

In September 1974 Komar and Melamid held an open-air art exhibit near Moscow that garnered international attention and outrage when the government tore it down. The event became known as the "Bulldozer Exhibition" and marked a turning point in the way the Soviet government treated its underground artists, giving them more freedom but not respect.

The two artists were expelled from Russia shortly after their exhibition and landed in Israel for a while. In 1978 they ended up in New York City, which is now their base of operation. Examples of their work are on display at the Barrick Museum.

Grisha Bruskin, whose media include porcelain, sculpting and painting, was living in Moscow at the time of the "Bulldozer Exhibition," but he didn't participate.

"I decided I was not yet prepared to show my art to the public," he said in a recent telephone interview from New York City.

A defining moment

He called the exhibition a defining moment. "After that, freedom came," he said. "Communism was still there, but alternative art could be shown (but not everywhere, only in designated places)."

Samples of Bruskin's work also are on exhibit at the Barrick Museum.

"The main problem I had in Russia was absence of freedom. Man cannot be happy without freedom," Bruskin, who immigrated to the United States in 1988, said. "In the U.S. I belong to myself. I am free. Nobody can direct what I should do or shouldn't. I can live my life like I want to.

"In Russia, the (government) was always looking for something to make you guilty. I was guilty because I was a Jew, an artist. I was guilty because I wanted good food and guilty because I wanted to travel abroad. Now, in the U.S., I am not guilty. I have a very good feeling."

Bruskin was a teacher in Moscow, practicing his art behind closed doors.

"I couldn't show my pieces in Russia," he said. "I was asked to come on trial with my artwork. They (the government) were considering what I was doing. My art related to my life. It was a different kind of work. My art analyzed socialism and Judaism. I was interested in both."

Bruskin said most of his friends were underground artists, and most of them left Russia for America, Germany, France and other countries where they could pursue their art.

He has seen changes in the new wave of Russian artists.

"The young artists do another kind of work," he said. "It's interesting, but it is a transition period. I will wait to make conclusions about the new movement, but they are free. They go everywhere. They are part of the international art field. It is fantastic."

Shalin, who immigrated from Russia in 1976, sometimes returns to his native land. He also sees dramatic differences between artists then and now.

'Not enough freedom'

"One thing about the Soviet-era art scene," he said, "there was not enough freedom, but if you were officially an artist you were paid a salary -- even if you did nothing.

"A lot of attention was given to artists. But after the Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB was no longer interested, artists discovered that they have all the freedom in the world, but they don't have an audience. They don't have the same kind of potential, the same kind of income.

"Now they must find ways to make ends meet and many of them do advertising or commission work they may hate or not care for. It requires marketing on their part, finding agents and so on. A difficult era dawned from the breakdown of the Soviet Union. It placed artists in a very difficult situation."

He said the majority of the artists who left the Soviet Union immigrated to the United States, settling primarily in New York and Los Angeles. Many of them are on welfare, he said. Some are barely making a living and others, such as Bruskin, Komar and Melamid, are successful and survive solely on income from their art.

The current exhibition is an extension of a three-day event held at UNLV in November commemorating the end of the Cold War. Shalin described the event as a festival that featured panel discussions, music performances, poetry readings and a screening of a film entitled "Images of America in Soviet Cinema."

"This is about the fascination of one country with another," he said. "Both countries came into existence as result of a revolution. Both considered themselves the messiah, the wave of the future."